'He asked me a great many questions, and when I told him that I had no one to teach me now I had left my dear Miss Ross, he looked very grave. He wanted to know if mamma did not help me at all, and I was obliged to confess that the French books were still unopened; and then he looked grave again and said, "Poor little thing!" as though he were sorry for me. 'Well, was it not strange?--the very next night Cyril began talking to mamma about it. He told her that now Kester was away they ought to be able to afford to give me a good education, that they were not poorer than they had been at Rutherford, and that something must be done at once. 'Cyril spoke as though he thought mamma was to blame, and then mamma cried, as she always does if Cyril finds fault with her; but the very next day she went out alone, and in the evening she told Cyril that she had found a very good school close by our lodgings, where they had excellent masters, and that she had arranged that I was to go there four times a week to take French, German, and music lessons. I could see Cyril was pleased, though he said very little, but by and by he asked me what I should do about a piano, and mamma suggested that we should hire one. Is this not nice, my dear Miss Ross, and is not Cyril a darling for thinking of everything so nicely?' 'Ah, Mollie, I am afraid you are a sad goose!' was Audrey's inward ejaculation at this point, and there was a smile on her lips as she finished the letter. Michael was fulfilling his promise nobly. Audrey knew him well enough to be sure that those meetings with Cyril were by no means accidental. 'Whatsoever thou doest, do it with thy might,' was a precept literally obeyed by Michael Burnett. When he held out that right hand of fellowship to his rival, there was no sense of grudging in his mind. If a cheery word or two would brighten Cyril's day, and make his hard life a little less unendurable, Michael would speak that word at the cost of any inconvenience to himself. Audrey may be forgiven if she cherished the notion that Michael's frequent visits to London were undertaken more for Cyril's benefit than his own; and if Michael could have given a somewhat different version of his motives, he kept all such interpretation to himself. CHAPTER XLV AUDREY RECEIVES A TELEGRAM 'One fourth of life is intelligible, the other three-fourths is unintelligible darkness; and our earliest duty is to cultivate the habit of not looking round the corner.'--MARK RUTHERFORD. 'Thou shalt lose thy life, and find it; thou shalt boldly cast it forth; And then back again receiving, know it in its endless worth.' ARCHBISHOP TRENCH. Audrey thought it was the longest summer term that she had ever known; never in her life had weeks or months passed so slowly.